The Pedestrians

This, I owe, to David P. Wallis.

I love it when people say, ya know what you outta paint ?

So, David says, ya know
I just stopped over at Mermaid Farm
and I think it would be great
to paint that pedestrians and bicyclists
quote thingy that they have
written in magic marker over the vegetables.

We have stopped there of course.
It’s a gem on middle road.
I often wish I knew the farmers
because they have a really groovy thing going on there.

So I gathered reference shots and sketches
from several different times of the day and year
and… when I was sorting through them
I saw
the chickens.

Bam, I’m in.
Bird series here we come.

But I had an editorial decision to make.
Half of the detail shots were from July
and half from October.
The light was different in both but I can handle that.
It was the produce.

Dahlia’s catching the warm afternoon light
a bag of papery dry onions
and an autumn tapestry of leaves
or…
those luscious purple onions
bunches of thick leaved dinosaur kale
potatoes and beans and summer hot green leaves.
And someone WILL notice if I mixed them together.

You can see I went with summer
but I figured I could pick and choose
among the two versions of tables and tin cans
rows of seed packets inside the shack
boxes and buckets
and the fifty different positions
in which I caught light cascading on the scale.

But among all those changing details
one thing stayed the same…
the red bicycle pump.

Did you find it yet ?

And that little lizardy thing…missed that one didn’t ya.

Thank you David P.